The Bridge Builders: Albania's Youth Confront a Region's Old Wounds

In a region where old divisions still shape daily life, a quiet shift is underway — led not by politicians or diplomats, but by hundreds of young people with cameras, microphones, and an unshakeable belief that dialogue can outlast division.

It is called “Youth for Inclusion, Equality and Trust” — a joint regional project of UNDP, UNFPA, UN Women, and UNESCO, implemented across Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Kosovo*. Its premise is deceptively simple: that in a region still living with the legacies of the past, of ethnic segregation, of hardened identities passed from one generation to the next, young people are not merely beneficiaries of peace — they are its architects.

"Young people are strategic actors in addressing structural fragility, strengthening social cohesion, and enhancing trust in institutions," says Ms. Pipa, Deputy Minister of Albania's Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sports. For the Ministry, youth empowerment is not a side project tucked into sectoral policy — it is, in her words, “a cross-cutting investment in the country's long-term stability, one aligned with the 2030 Agenda, the Youth, Peace and Security agenda, and Albania's EU accession path.”

"Our cooperation with the UN agencies is vital in addressing key drivers of fragility — gender-based discrimination, declining trust between youth and institutions — and it contributes directly to peacebuilding and social cohesion, both nationally and regionally."

A Region Still Writing Its Story

To understand why this matters, it helps to understand what came before. Over the past three decades, Albania and its neighbors have moved through the collapse of communism, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and the conflicts that followed. Peace agreements and constitutional reforms eventually pulled most of the region back from the brink. But deeper the work of trust — was never finished.

Divisive narratives still circulate online, in classrooms, at political rallies, feeding off old grievances and new anxieties alike. Youth emigration has hollowed out communities, leaving behind young people who inherited a fractured past without necessarily choosing it. Traditional gender norms and toxic masculinity — intensified, not eased, by the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic — continue to fuel hate speech, much of it misogynistic, much of it aimed at anyone who challenges the "other."

Youth for Inclusion, Equality and Trust project was built to answer exactly this moment: a regional promise that fact-based, constructive narratives — carried by the young people who will inherit this region — can do what politics alone cannot.

During the first phase of the project, youth councils were strengthened, young leaders were trained and supported to design their own anti-hate-speech projects, and hundreds of young Albanians — many from hard-to-reach communities — were trained in conflict transformation and gender equality through peace education.

A year-long public campaign, "Words Kill! Think Carefully!", carried that work into classrooms, newsrooms, and sports fields — from journalism training at the University of Tirana to inclusive basketball tournaments with Special Olympics Albania. Along the way, young Albanians took their experience regional and global, from Western Balkans youth assemblies to the UN General Assembly itself.

If Phase I built the scaffolding, the events that followed showed what happens when young people start climbing it themselves. Across municipalities, dozens of young people were trained in peacebuilding y-peer and bystander-intervention methods — and the results held up months later: most said they'd actually used the skills in daily life, and nearly half had gone on to take their own initiative in peacebuilding.

"We didn't just learn how to name a stereotype," one young fellow from the programme underlined. "We learned how to stand in the room when someone else is being targeted, and actually say something. That's the part nobody teaches you." 

That same ambition to build the region's future leadership runs through the project's new Regional Youth Peacebuilding Fellowship — a platform built to grow leaders who see the whole region, not just their hometown, as their constituency. From over 50 applicants across the Western Balkans, a cohort of fellows was selected and has already begun regional training together.

"For the first time, I'm not just fixing something in my own city," said one fellow after a regional gathering. "I'm sitting across from people from five other countries, and we're arguing about the same problems, and somehow that argument feels like hope."

That energy is beginning to show up in policy, not just in training rooms. Municipal officers have been trained, action plans drafted— a signal that this isn't just grassroots momentum, but a shift starting to take hold in government itself. 
Alongside it, a third strand of the project is about voice: young journalists producing constructive media content across the region, and a youth performance collective taking peacebuilding messages to diverse audiences.

For the United Nations, Albania's experiment carries weight well beyond its borders. 

This investment in peace is central to the Charter of the United Nations," said Ingrid Macdonald, the UN Resident Coordinator in Albania, describing the support the project has received from the Secretary-General's Peacebuilding Support Office.

She noted that the project's sub-regional design — a single project stitched across six countries and territories — has become a kind of laboratory due to its unique nature.

"It is important to learn from it," she said, "and to take the sub-regional learning into the global peace environment, particularly in a period when the world is changing."

"It is a joint project of UNDP, UNFPA, UN Women and UNESCO, which signifies the one UN approach," she said. "There can be no peace without implementation of the Youth, Peace and Security and Women, Peace and Security agendas — their mainstreaming is very important."

This is not a finish line but a compounding effect — training turning into teaching, plans turning into policy, six countries and territories starting to treat each other's problems as their own. 

At its core, this is not a sectoral programme, but a conviction that trust between generations and neighbors is not inherited but built. Six countries and territories are learning, slowly, to treat reconciliation not as a debt owed to the past but as an investment in the future they share.

The Youth for Inclusion, Equality and Trust project is a joint project of UNDP, UNFPA, UN Women, and UNESCO, implemented in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia, and Kosovo financed by the UN Peacebuilding Fund

*All references to Kosovo are understood to be in the context of UN Security Council resolution 1244 (1999).